The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (89 page)

The Saudis helped the American effort. On September 5, 2006, Prince Bandar met with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Bandar expressed Saudi support for efforts to cut off Iran financially and offered to head a tour of Europe to raise awareness of deceptive Iranian banking and business practices that aided its support for terrorism. The United States liked the idea, and on October 10 both Hadley and Rice met with Bandar and expressed American support, with the president adding his similar views during an Oval Office meeting on November 10. The Treasury Department passed Bandar a list of talking points and financial institutions with whom Bandar should meet to stress the importance of isolating both Syria and Iran. Bandar dutifully made the rounds, trying to convince the Europeans to cut off their financial dealings with Iran.

In December 2007, the U.S. intelligence community released a National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear program that deflated the efforts to hype the Iranian nuclear peril. The intelligence community judged “with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons program.” Assuming it would leak, Bush ordered portions of the NIE declassified. It created a sensation about the need to continue pressuring Iran, and any talk about a military option evaporated. Lost in the postleak hullabaloo about Iran ceasing its weapons program was the fact that Iran had run a covert program and stopped the nuclear warhead design only shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At the time, Iran feared attack and had approached the United States with its grand bargain that May. Nevertheless, when Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia in January 2008, he opened the meeting with King Abdullah, “Your Majesty, may I begin the meeting. I’m confident every one of you believes I wrote the NIE as a way to avoid taking action against Iran. You have to understand our system. The NIE was produced independently by our intelligence community. I am as angry about it as you are.” Indeed, the Saudis and the other Gulf states were angry. Many suspected the United States had reached a secret accommodation with Iran.

“The NIE didn’t just undermine diplomacy,” Bush wrote. “It also tied my hands on the military side.”
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Talk of military strikes against Iran’s facilities ended within the administration.

Iran answered with more centrifuges and expanded enrichment. In April 2008, President Ahmadinejad announced during a visit to Iran’s main enrichment complex at Natanz that it had started installing six thousand centrifuges at the site, twice the number currently spinning uranium. Iran continued to proclaim the peaceful nature of its nuclear program. It stressed a fatwa against nuclear weapons issued by the supreme leader in 2005 and called for a nuclear-free Middle East. “We are willing to negotiate over controls, inspections, and international guarantees,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said, but he viewed it as his country’s right under the nonproliferation treaty to enrich uranium, and any effort to halt that impinged on its right to nuclear energy.

A
s the Bush administration neared its end, it tried a last, weak push to resolve the nuclear standoff with Iran. The six powers had offered a “freeze-for-freeze,” with Iran agreeing not to expand its program in return for no additional sanctions, and included a package of new economic and
political incentives in return for halting enrichment of uranium. The British had asked the United States to send an American diplomat to Tehran when they presented the latest offer to Iran, but the Americans balked.
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Instead, on a Saturday in July 2008, William Burns, who had recently replaced Nicholas Burns (no relationship) as the undersecretary of state for political affairs, walked in during the ongoing talks at Geneva’s city hall between Iran and the six nations that had been haggling with Iran for more than three years. While any meeting with the Americans and Iranians at the same table became a public spectacle, Burns never spoke privately with his Iranian counterpart. The U.S. delegation made it known that his presence was a onetime affair designed to show support for the talks and reiterated that further talks would be based upon the precondition that Iran stop uranium enrichment. Iran again rejected the precondition.

In the end, the United States failed to halt Iran’s nuclear program. But the administration had taken long strides down the sanctions road, and these would bite deep into Iran over time. While the Bush administration’s second term appeared more unified on Iran, in the end disagreements again plagued a coherent policy. Rice’s views on a dual track of sanctions and diplomacy prevailed because of her personal relationship with the president and drowned out those calling for shunning Iran. These internal squabbles undermined a vibrant policy. Offering the stark contrast of freedom versus totalitarianism had worked well in undermining popular support for the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Rice and Bush set out a similar program designed to undermine the Iranian government through open information. But this contrasted with the hard-liners who desired to isolate Iran. They worried that allowing more Iranian students to come to the United States invited dangerous technology transfers and Iranian spies inside the United States. These attitudes undermined the basic intent of the freedom agenda. By refusing to talk to Iran, the United States operated blindly. American diplomats and intelligence analysts had minimal insight into the opinions of the Iranian people or its government and largely depended on third parties for information and insight into the country. In the end, American policy rested on prejudice and supposition more than fact.

But the one area where the facts proved incontrovertible and all the parties in the U.S. government should have agreed was Iraq. The American invasion opened the door for Iranian influence, and Iran moved to consolidate its power. While a nervous Iran had been willing to make an accommodation to
the United States in 2003, by the second Bush term Iran no longer felt the need. Instead, the Revolutionary Guard decided to punish the power of “global arrogance.” While the United States debated Iran’s nuclear program, the secretive Quds Force began a quasi-war with the Americans. For the first time since the tanker wars and Operation Earnest Will, the two nations squared off in a low-level war as CENTCOM forged a new plan to combat Iran. The twilight war moved toward darkness.

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s Washington prepared for Christmas 2006, President Bush and Vice President Cheney traveled by motorcade the short distance over to the Pentagon. After the normal staged handshakes with some service personnel in the hallway, the two men sat down with the six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff around the long table in a conference room that served as the temporary Tank, as long-awaited Pentagon renovations forced the men out of their usual haunts on the outer E ring. Stephen Hadley and Donald Rumsfeld joined them, as did the latter’s designated successor, a levelheaded, sometimes ruthless, former CIA analyst and seasoned government official Robert Gates.

The affable chairman, Peter Pace, presented the president with a five-page document of PowerPoint slides titled “Joint Chiefs of Staff Military Advice—Predecisional—Close Hold.” The briefing addressed a new military plan to win in Iraq. Tall and good looking, Pace had served six years in the top two positions within the military, where he used the talents that had earned him the nickname among his Annapolis classmates of “Perfect Peter” to get along with the prickly secretary of defense. He offered his advice only in private and had raised no discernable objections to the strategy toward Iran
or in Iraq, even as the latter derailed under the pressure of religious strife and a growing insurgency.

Iraq had dominated much of these men’s attention that fall. In the aftermath of the bombing of an important Shia shrine by Iraqi al-Qaeda, the security situation had deteriorated dramatically, and despite Rumsfeld’s public claims to the contrary, it had descended into a full-scale religious civil war. The first line on the briefing summed up the situation as the chiefs viewed it: “We are not losing, but we are not yet winning—time is not on our side.” Pace added his own comments to this: “at home, in the region, and in Iraq.”

The normally reticent decider, President George W. Bush, understood the ramifications of failure, and for one of the first times, he fully engaged in the policy discussions, probing his divided advisers for answers. Army general David Petraeus, had requested additional troops for a surge that would support a new counterinsurgency strategy to win the war, yet the four-star generals in Washington, Tampa, and Baghdad all opposed the idea. Pace had asked for the meeting in the Tank for the service chiefs to air their views, but the senior officers and generals offered no new ideas—just an expansion of the current plan to increase training of the Iraqi army and put it in the lead. It was more a “crisis in perception, confidence, not violence,” they said, and they recommended merely expanding the advisory effort to train the Iraqi army faster. “Now is not the time to surge U.S. combat forces, Mr. President,” said U.S. Army chief of staff General Peter Schoomaker, who had been plucked out of retirement by Rumsfeld.
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“What’s new?” Bush said. “We are doing much of this already. I have deep anxiety about Baghdad’s security.” The problem was that the Iraqi train was coming off the rails due to a lack of security, primarily in the Iraqi capital, and the president knew it.

Toward the end of the meeting, the talks turned to Iran’s role in fomenting the violence. As the American problems mounted, Iran grew more emboldened. That year, Iran had dramatically increased its support for Shia militias and provided a new, sophisticated type of improvised explosive device that had killed 140 coalition soldiers.

“We are working on an execute order to neutralize their networks,” Pace said. This would be part of an overarching military plan to counter Iran that included enhancing the Gulf Arab defense capabilities to respond to Iranian aggression. CENTCOM proposed two courses of action to deal with Iranians
inside Iraq. The first was a nonlethal option to harass and expose their operatives; the second would be a high-end option: to immediately begin arresting Iranian agents inside Iraq and targeting their surrogate forces in the Middle East. The chiefs cautioned against taking action that might escalate the crisis and highlighted the risks of taking direct action without Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s approval, but some in the room wanted decisive action. As one participant wrote in his notes: “Kill Iranians in Iraq.”

In the boldest decision of his presidency, Bush overruled the generals, including Pace, and in January 2007 authorized sending in the de facto American reserve of five brigades—thirty thousand troops—to Iraq. And just two days after the meeting in the Tank, the president also gave the go-ahead to take military action against Iran. Amid the drama of the surge debate on Iraq, the United States and Iran again appeared on a collision course to war.

T
he appointment in mid-2003 of a new CENTCOM commander, General John Abizaid, portended a more informed approach to the Middle East by the U.S. military. He relieved Tommy Franks in an unprecedentedly garish ceremony at an indoor sports stadium in downtown Tampa. Franks had declined a request by the chairman to extend for an extra year to provide continuity on the war in Iraq in order to rest and pursue a lucrative book deal. A Lebanese American, fluent in Arabic, Abizaid had served as the senior plans officer for the chairman at the outset of the invasion of Iraq. In private discussions leading up to the U.S. invasion, Abizaid had cautioned that diminishing Iraqi power might provide an opening for Iran, much in the same vein as the United States worried about removing Saddam Hussein during Desert Storm in 1991. During the war, Abizaid served as the forward deputy commander of CENTCOM, where he was one of the few who cautioned against allowing the unchecked looting and the open support for some of the Shia militias.

From the outset, Abizaid focused on Iran. He worried that the United States lacked a strategic plan for the Middle East, with Washington entirely focused on the war in Iraq. “We cannot lose sight of the growing role Iran is playing across the region,” he wrote to Rumsfeld shortly after taking over CENTCOM.

Abizaid worried about an unintended conflict with Iran. On June 21, 2006, a U.S. Navy P-3 aircraft harassed an Iranian submarine by dropping
sonar buoys around it, and closed provocatively close again three days later. Tehran sent a diplomatic note to the United States protesting the incident. Since 2001, the United States had exchanged forty such démarches with Iran, each protesting the other country’s actions, and while this seemed innocuous, if the Iranians mistook sonar buoys for bombs, there would be a shooting war in the Persian Gulf.

A more disturbing incident occurred toward the end of Abizaid’s tenure. The water boundary between Iran and Iraq—haggled over in 1975—was a straight line from the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab. Over the years, the shifting sands had moved the boundary, and Iran and the coalition disagreed on the exact location of the international boundary. Since 2003, the Revolutionary Guard had increased its presence in the area, forming a new 3rd Naval District and establishing a surveillance post on a massive crane, leaning and heavily damaged from the Iran-Iraq War. U.S. sailors called it the sunken crane. On March 23, 2007, the HMS
Cornwall
dispatched a Royal Marines and sailor boarding party to search a suspected smuggler ship located near the disputed maritime border.

Alerted by the sunken crane, two Revolutionary Guard speedboats came across the waters. The senior Iranian commander was Captain Abol-Ghassem Amangah. Aggressive and ambitious, he quickly realized that the water was too shallow for the HMS
Cornwall
to come within ten miles. As his boats approached, most of the British personnel were searching the ship, leaving only a couple of sailors in the two Zodiacs. While the conversation was cordial at first, Amangah quickly accused the British of entering Iranian waters. Without any orders from his headquarters, the guard officer ordered his men to train their weapons on the British, and told the British to surrender and follow him to his base. After trying in vain to get support from their superiors and fearing loss of life, the Royal Navy lieutenant in charge ordered his detachment to surrender. The Iranians stepped into the British boats and took over the controls, driving them back to Amangah’s base in Iran.